U.S. Chain Will Help Run 13 Moscow Hotels : Accommodations: Radisson will teach the Russians to offer better service at the poorly operated facilities.

Many Moscow visitors have complained bitterly of having to stay in roach-infested hotel rooms, complete with missing fixtures and maids more adept at snooping than at making beds. Not to mention unpalatable food.

No more, perhaps.

A deal announced last week between the Minneapolis-based parent of the Radisson hotel chain and Mosintour, the firm that runs many of Moscow’s hotels, promises to make the Russian capital a more pleasant destination for tourists and business people alike.

Carlson Hospitality Group, whose Radisson hotel chain already operates one luxury hotel here, said it formed a joint venture to oversee operations at 13 of Moscow’s largest hotels and bring a Western standard of service to some 9,000 hotel rooms.

The agreement is tantamount to an admission by the Russians that they simply cannot offer world-class service alone--an about-face from the claims of Intourist, the old government organization that monopolized tourism in the former Soviet Union.

“We very much need the expertise of organizations such as Radisson,” said Nikolai Shevelkin, president of Mosintour, which was formed this year from the ruins of Intourist.

“We need to train our employees and hope that Radisson will help us do that.”

Carlson Hospitality is part of Carlson Cos., a hotel, tourism and restaurant conglomerate. “The Russians came to us with a proposal that we form a new company” to take over Moscow’s best hotels, Curtis L. Carlson, Carlson Group chairman, said in a telephone interview.

He said he arranged the joint venture directly with Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov.

As it improves service, Carlson Hospitality said it will try to find foreign investors to finance needed renovations at many of the hotels.

About $200 million in refurbishing is needed to bring the older hotels up to Western standards, Shevelkin said.

The hotels covered by the Carlson-Mosintour Management Company joint venture include such landmarks as the huge French-built Kosmos in northern Moscow, the Intourist across from Red Square, the Belgrade near the Foreign Ministry, the Olympic Penta Hotel, Hotel Metropol and Radisson Slavjanskaya. The value of the 13 hotels covered by the agreement is about $1 billion, according to Bartels.

The joint venture is expected to take over another three or four hotels in Moscow as part of the deal, Carlson said. It also will supervise the construction of several new hotels and take over Russian tourism promotion worldwide.

An estimated 7 million people a year visit Moscow for business or pleasure. The company said it expects to use Carlson Travel Network--some 2,178 travel agencies worldwide--in the promotion effort.

Carlson Hospitality opened the Radisson Slavjanskaya, the first American-run hotel in Moscow, in the summer of 1991. Carlson acknowledged that his firm’s past dealings in Russia were not easy. The opening of the Slavjanskaya was delayed by construction problems and other hassles, he said.

“We were really quite distressed by the slowness of putting a package together,” he said. “But once the hotel was open and started making money, it was a whole new atmosphere.”

Several of the Moscow hotels covered by the Carlson venture have management contracts with foreign firms. Officials said the new agreement will supplement, rather than replace, those agreements.